The technique uses “Easi-CRISPR” technology, another invention of Dr. Ohtsuka. CRISPR, the widely used gene editing technique, can alter target genes at a location of the user’s choice. Previous attempts to utilize CRISPR in transgenic experiments have run into problems, says Dr. Channabasavaiah Gurumurthy, Associate Professor at the University of Nebraska and the co-inventor of Easi-CRISPR. “The previously tried CRISPR methods, which used double-stranded DNA donor cassettes, did not achieve the required level of cassette insertion – they are successful only ~1% to 10% of the time. The single-stranded DNA donor format in Easi-CRISPR overcomes this hurdle and achieves insertion efficiency as high as 100% in some cases.” (READ MORE)

Procreation is becoming a matter of manufacturing, engineering, quality control, and other accouterments of industrial control. Babies are already made by IVF, and then sorted for health and neo-eugenics attributes — including sex. Desired embryos are implanted in a uterus — either that of the mother, or a rented “gestational carrier’s.” The unwanted nascent humans are discarded as medical waste, put in cold storage, or donated for research. If certain bioethicists and biotechnologists get their way, technological reproduction will grow even more precise and dehumanizing. (READ MORE)

Think cheaters never prosper? Lance Armstrong won the Tour de France seven times. Manny Ramirez won two World Series championships. Ben Johnson won an Olympic gold medal. That’s a whole lot of prosperity. Sure, officials eventually figured out that Armstrong, Ramirez, and Johnson used prohibited performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) and penalized them accordingly. However, countless others get away with it. And in the not-so-distant future, athletes could cheat in a way that’s even harder, if not impossible, to detect. It’s called gene doping. Scientists are figuring out how to literally rewrite our genetic code through genetic modification and gene editing. That means tomorrow’s athletes could take the field with genes purposely, synthetically altered. How would that work? you may wonder. (READ MORE)

Common sense suggests we are entering, or possibly sleepwalking into at our peril, the age of artificial intelligence (AI). At the same time, we may be on the precipice of radical growth in human productivity enabled by bio-technological enhancements. Although AI technology has advanced to the point where work and jobs are potentially being threatened, the field of human augmentation could quite suddenly raise the bar for our so-called robot rivals. Whilst augmentation may be seen as extremely controversial on social, moral, ethical, and religious grounds, it opens up possibilities which society must be aware of and make careful choices about. Most of the emerging transformational technologies aimed at human enhancement fall under a few general categories, despite a good deal of crossover. (READ MORE)

Over the past 35 years, I’ve been showing how elements of the Brave New World are coming together. Lately, I’ve been focusing on 5G wireless, the Internet of Things, gene-editing, and DNA-altering vaccines. We now have a very important piece of the puzzle: artificial embryos. A chilling prospect. MIT Technology Review has the story: “In a breakthrough that redefines how life can be created, embryologists working at the University of Cambridge in the UK have grown realistic-looking mouse embryos using only stem cells. No egg. No sperm. Just cells plucked from another embryo.” (READ MORE)

MIT Technology Review reports that gene editing companies and biotechnology lobbyists are trying to convince the Trump administration to move the regulation of GE animals to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). If that happens, genetically modified meat might soon show up in grocery stores near you. But why does the system have to change for us to eat this most modern of meat? And should we want it to? Today, a law called the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic (FD&C) Act gives the FDA the jurisdiction to regulate all genetically modified livestock. The agency does so using the same certification procedures required of drugs — “Altered genomic DNA in an animal that is intended to affect the structure or function of the body of the resulting animal meets the definition of a drug,” FDA spokesperson Juli Putnam said in an email to Futurism. The FDA’s rules encompass all editing processes, from transgenic editing (in which genes from one organism are introduced into another) to gene editing (which includes more precise editing techniques like CRISPR that simply “snip” portions of DNA to remove, relocate, or duplicate a useful trait)… (READ MORE)